But complaining about NAT is not a new fad and usage of NAT hasn't been
stemmed the tiniest bit. We can't keep burying our heads in the sand and
trying to deny new work on dealing with NAT. It's here, it isn't going away
and we have to find solutions for applications that need to deal with NAT.
By all means, let's deal with NAT. Let's find better solutions to the
problems that NAT purports to solve - solutions that don't create the
plethora of additional problems that inherently come with NATs.
By all means, let's stop burying our heads in the sand. Let's stop
pretending that we can solve these problems by further embellishing NATs,
or that the only way forward is to keep adding warts to NATs.
NAT is an architecturally bankrupt strategy - the more you try to fix
it, the more complex the architecture becomes, the harder it becomes to
write and configure applications, and the the more brittle the network
becomes. There is no way to fix the problems created by NAT without
a global name space for points in the network topology, and this is
the thing that NAT fundamentally destroys.
Work in this area is starting in the new MIDCOM working group. But some
people are still worried about being politically correct with respect to
denying the perceived legitimacy of NAT.
That's not political correctness, it's sound engineering.
Keith